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Message from the Final Hours

I managed to end the last workday of the workyear on a positive note! Late in the afternoon, my team uncovered the source of an insidious bug that was making customers unhappy. We fixed it and ran some tests that all passed. After almost two weeks of pointless flailing and lamentations of the developers, we made progress. Potentially big progress, customer-happiness-making progress. We won’t know until next week, but at least we will be entering the New Year with hope. Score one for the happy horror writer!*

Today, I plan to work my way through what remains of the proofing. If you are indie and looking for friendly, efficient, and quality editing, either for copy edit or proofing, I can recommend Everything Indie. They’re affordable, too, which is a huge win for authors that have mortgages, dogs, hungry bellies, and bodies that must be clothed.**

Tomorrow I will start my next novel. I might join the #WIP500 group Cara Michaels is forming. The community aspect of the group would be nice; I wrote my last novel entirely in a writer’s vacuum. Are any of you joining? Have you had luck with groups like this in the past? Am I a chicken casting about for excuses?

Definitely chicken… I’m a happy horror writing chicken?

My self-imposed deadline for the first draft of the next novel is very ambitious. For an 83000 word novel, I’ll need to write 692 words a day, 30 days a month, if I want to finish in four months. STOLEN CLIMATES is 73,000 words, down from 130,000 in the first (hideously bloated) draft. STOLEN CLIMATES took me a year and a half to get to a workable ‘first’ draft; that odyssey involved a complete rewrite of the original story that cut out characters, melded characters, cut scenes, and added a supernatural element. If you ever read STOLEN CLIMATES, you’re going to wonder what was happening when the supernatural was absent. The answer is: a lot of boring dialog about the ethics of vegetarianism. No, none of that made it into the final version.

I should get to work. The dogs are going bonkers because they want their walk. My stomach is growling for breakfast. A load of laundry needs to be moved to the dryer. And STOLEN CLIMATES needs to be a wrap, because tomorrow I start my second novel!

Happy New Year!!

*Points should also be awarded to my mom, who fielded a less-than-happy lunch time call from her frazzled daughter.
**Unless the author lives at Hippy Hollow, then clothing is optional.

I’ve just signed up for #WIP500 to coerce myself into wrapping up one of my two unfinished novels and to help spur me on to dive into a few of the short story ideas I’ve been amassing over the last year. It would be great to see you there, too.